UC Berkeley fined in deaths of lab animals

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Tuesday that it has fined UC Berkeley $8,750 for allowing five lab animals to die of thirst in 2011.

The creatures were small, long-tailed rodents called voles that were part of a study of circadian rhythms looking at how light affects physiology, said Roger Van Andel, director of the Office of Laboratory Animal Care at UC Berkeley, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

"We took very aggressive action to make sure this sort of thing could not occur again," Van Andel said. He noted that the death of the animals was the first such incident to happen at the campus, which no longer uses voles but performs research on about 100,000 mice each year in addition to other animals.

UC Davis was issued a citation, according to the Chronicle, after a macaque monkey was crushed to death in 2012 when it fiddled with the squeeze mechanism that kept its cage closed. The campus responded by changing the locks on cages only where researchers noticed monkeys manipulating the squeeze mechanism, but the Agriculture Department said that wasn't good enough.

In October, the federal agency ordered the California National Primate Research Center, located on the UCD campus, to secure the locks on all cages by November.

"These cage mechanisms are now all padlocked," said spokesman Andy Fell, noting that the center houses about 5,000 monkeys that are checked twice a day. Many of them also live in large family groups in half-acre outdoor corrals, he said.

The Chronicle reported that Davis researchers rely on the monkeys to test treatments for a range of diseases, from HIV/AIDS to asthma and Alzheimer's.